Lufthansa to drop services to Abu Dhabi

FRANKFURT - German airline Lufthansa announced Thursday that it will pull the plug on its once-daily flights between Frankfurt and Abu Dhabi due to competition from its Gulf rival Etihad.

"Substantial capacity has arisen in recent years on services between Germany and the United Arab Emirates because state-subsidised Gulf carriers have massively increased their presence," Lufthansa complained in a statement.

"This development has been further exacerbated by the fact that Etihad Airways has unfairly been allowed to offer and market code-sharing flights with Air Berlin," the German airline continued.

"In face of huge over-capacity, the service between Frankfurt and Abu Dhabi has become increasingly uneconomical for us. We are now taking the consequences and will drop the service from our timetable starting from summer 2015," Lufthansa said.

The carrier complained that the unfair competition from state-subsidised airlines in the Gulf region putting jobs at risk in the German airline sector.